Archive for February, 2013

Seven budding entrepreneurs with Greater Lowell connections are finalists in the Merrimack Valley Sandbox Initiative’s Accelerator Program based at UMass Lowell, according to a university press release. They will join a handful of others at a business-plan competition this Tuesday in Lawrence, at which winners will share $25,000 in seed money for their venture. Among

When the suits from the bank wouldn’t help Westford hairdresser Wendy Hopkins, the community did. Ten years later, the proprietor of Atmosphere Salon, at the Gateway Plaza, is celebrating her 10th anniversary. “I knew I could make this work,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. It wasn’t always that way. But because it

Corporate mergers, when done properly, tend to bring increased synergies, efficiencies and, perhaps most importantly to those planning them, savings to the new combined entity. That’s the good news. The bad news is generally confined to the labor market — mergers almost always subtract jobs. A local case in point: the merger of Lowell General

Much has been written and said about the challenges in the defense industry — particularly should the government fail to come to a deficit agreement. But FLIT Systems Inc. of Oregon, which employs more than 300 people in offices in Billerica and Nashua, has still managed to give its investors something to smile about. The

There’s a full-page advertisement in today’s Sun on Page 10 marking a special anniversary for Enterprise Bank founder George Duncan. It was 25 years ago today that Duncan, already a well-known banker in the region, had begun the process of forming Enterprise Bank. The Lowell native had just resigned his position as chief executive at

The next time somebody tells you that inflation is tame, inform them that food prices in Massachusetts rose a 1970s-like 8.1 percent last year. That’s according to the Massachusetts Restaurant Association, as relayed by Dennis Serpone, president of the New England Restaurant Brokers and the National Restaurant Exchange in Wakefield. Serpone, in a recent column

Those who were betting that mortgage rates would sink beneath the all-time lows set in November appear to be wrong. Of course, one might suppose there weren’t too many of those in that camp. On Thursday, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac announced that the average 30-year mortgage throughout the U.S. was 3.53 percent. Historically, that’s still